Bachelor courses

The Department of Accounting has successfully educated many generations of SSE students.

At the bachelor program at SSE we give three mandatory courses in Accounting and Financial Management (currently all three courses are held in Swedish). The first course “Inledande Redovisning” (300 Inledande redovisning) is an introductory course in Financial accounting, where the content of, the relation between, and the interpretation of the three basic financial accounting reports: income statement, cash flow statement and balance sheet is discussed. The second course “Ekonomisk Analys och Styrning” (301 Ekonomisk analys och styrning ) is an introductory course in Management accounting where capital budgeting, costing, budgeting and methods for linear optimization is discussed. The third course “Redovisning och Finansiering” (302 Redovisning och finansiering) deepens the student’s knowledge of financial accounting and analysis and is centered on how to analyze firm performance with the help of key ratios, such as profit margin, return on equity and return on capital employed.

In the third year of the bachelor program we offer a specialization in Accounting and Financial Management. Our specialization has, for many years, been the most popular specialization at SSE with more than half of all SSE students applying (as one of their two specializations).

During the fall semester of the specialization (5th semester of the Bachelor Program) we offer two courses, both held in English. In these two courses we build on the knowledge acquired during the first two years of study, but go both deeper and wider.

The first course, “Financial Reporting and Financial Markets” (631 Financial Reporting and Financial Markets ), takes an external perspective of the firm. It covers more complex financial accounting issues and is designed to give students tools for performing financial analysis and corporate valuations on the basis of an informed use of financial accounting reports. During the course, students get to construct a financial planning model for a listed company, where knowledge in financial accounting, financial analysis and corporate valuation is practically applied.

The second course, “Corporate Reporting and Control” (632 Corporate Reporting and Control ), takes an internal perspective of the firm and discusses and analyses management control systems. The course covers issues like: corporate governance, the organization's internal structure in the form of responsibility centers, transfer pricing, strategic planning, economic value added, performance management and the balanced scorecard. These issues are important since management control failures can lead to large financial losses, reputation damage and possibly even to organisational failure.

During the spring semester of the specialization (6th semester of the Bachelor Program) we offer one elective course: “Accounting Problems in Equity Valuation” (738 Accounting Problems in Equity Valuation) which aims at giving students a good understanding of the equity market, familiarity with some of the methods commonly used for company valuation and understanding in how financial accounting information is used in that context.

During the spring semester, students are also required to write their Bachelor Thesis within the Thesis Course (639 BSc Theses within Accounting and Financial Management). The seminars cover issues such as: the process of thesis writing, how to choose a topic and what methods that is available for analysis. When writing the thesis, students practice how to use theory and empirical methods to analyze a research problem within the field of accounting and financial management.